Skating Lessons

Of course, if I was going to be hacked–inconveniencing me and my twenty-odd readers–it would be during the Copenhagen summit. Fortunately I know all of you were well-supplied with climate news from other quarters and that the only real consequence was that you were spared my nail-biting highs and lows as I oscillated between hope that maybe something of note would come out of it after all and despair that I was witnessing the beginning of the end of the world. Not to mention the shame of watching our nation’s leader drag Canada’s reputation through black crude; now I can worry about revealing my Canadianness when next I travel abroad.

Maybe I’ll just stay home.

I’ll claim it’s climate-friendly.

Anyway. The thing is, in Toronto in January, it’s easy to forget we even have a non-built environment. We scurry from heated home to heated car or heated subway to heated mall or heated office, spending agonizing minutes at a time exposed to the wind and twisting our ankles in the slush at the side of the roads. And yes, I know that Toronto is relatively blessed climate-wise for Canada and we could live in St. John or Saskatoon and know what a real Canadian winter is like. Stuff it. All I am saying is that Torontonians generally spend the time periods bracketed by Christmas and the spring thaw pretending that there is no such thing as a non-built environment.

This is not surprising. The Canadian winter can, and until the 20th century regularly did, kill people. It was not all that unusual for poorer Canadians to run out of wood for their stoves sometime in February (and in echoes of today’s political debates, albeit with less potential for disaster, be scolded by the rich and the political conservatives for being poor in the first place and in the second daring to spend a single cent of their meagre resources on anything not strictly related to survival, thus deserving to die by freezing).

I digress. The point is: it’s Toronto, it’s winter, it’s cold, the closest most of us come to the natural environment is the greenery at the local mall, and half the time it’s fake.

Not that being outside with all that non-human nature stuff loses its positive effects. I’m sure it would still make me a kinder, more altruistic, happier, healthier person with higher levels of vitamin D. It’s just uncomfortable. Really, in Toronto in the wintertime, you have two options: 1) Coccoon. Never be farther than 20 feet from a heating vent of some kind. Drink lots of tea or coffee. Plot the shortest possible point between any two external doors. The non-built environment is out to get you; avoid it all costs. 2) Learn to enjoy the cold.

My daughter, sweet innocent poppet that she is, does not yet have to learn to enjoy the cold (though she does shiver along with me while we walk to her school in the morning, pitiably lamenting, “I wish it was spring!”). She wants to build snowmen and make snow angels and examine the prints different kinds of animals make in the snow; she wants to get a toboggan and ride it downhill. She wants to skate.

She doesn’t know how to skate. I don’t know how to skate. I’ve lived in Canada for 34 years; I’ve been dragged to oodles of yearly skating field trips during my public school career. Each time I would wobble fearfully around the ice–did I mention I was terrified of ice when I was in grade school? That I would often walk around a frozen puddle rather than risk slipping on it?–find some sort of a hobbledy gait, decide I liked it ok, put the skates away and only bring them out during the next year’s field trip. It was warmer inside and I had books to read. But Frances wants to learn how to skate, which means I need to learn how to skate, which means dear god help me she’d better like it or she’ll have hell to pay.

(Metaphorically speaking. No pressure.)

This means that tomorrow the boyfriend is teaching me to skate. Or, at least, he’s going to try. He was born in Korea and he plays hockey every week. I was born in Toronto and I still shuffle my way across a frozen puddle. I love Canada. Anyway: he is going to teach me how to skate, and if you think I sound nervous about this you’d be right, and his threat to bring a camera and provide the world or at least a few close friends with photographic evidence (or blackmail material, I’m not sure which) is only partially contributing.

Still. I am determined to learn how to enjoy, or at least tolerate, the Canadian winter, for as long as we still have one, rather than spend January and February pining for April and trout lilies (though there will be that too). Then I might have more to tell you about between now and our annual flooded-creek warnings. That I may be providing Frances with an athletic skill that will be all but useless in the February of Toronto 2030 when we no longer have ice in winter, I refuse to contemplate.

It’s my untested belief that expertise in any technical field will result in a near-total loss of respect for journalism.

I know it did for me. The more I learned about climate change, the biodiversity crisis, environmental regulations, and renewable energy, the more I realized that newspaper articles reflected reality only by chance, in passing. More often, an ill-equipped person with good writing skills and no critical thinking ability would write a piece far outside of their education and background by interviewing a bunch of people who claimed to be experts, without evaluating their credentials. We get climate change pieces giving equal weight to well-respected international climate experts and oil-funded PR hacks, pieces on renewable energy with well-reasoned arguments by scientists quoting the best available information and fruit-loop arguments by naturopaths who wouldn’t recognize a herz if it came up and hit them on the head.

And you end up with a voting public almost completely muddled on key issues because they’ve come to the completely totally 100% incontrovertibly WRONG conclusion that there are two sides.

Of course people are entitled to their opinions. I am legally well within my rights to believe that Mars is peopled by winged skeletons who worship Lily Allen. But the legal right to hold an opinion is not the same, and can’t be the same, as the attitude that reality is then required to bend to accommodate that opinion. No matter what I believe, Mars is in fact NOT peopled by winged skeletons who worship Lily Allen, or by anything at all. The experts are right and I am just plain wrong. (Or I would be, if I held that opinion.)

This set of science experiments sheds some light on the psychology of our inherent tendency to give equal weight to two contrary opinions, even when one comes from an expert and the other does not. Fortunately, for those of you who have no intention of purchasing the article for the low-low price of $10, you can also read this fun summation in the Washington Post.

This went on for 256 intervals, so the two individuals got to know each other quite well — and to know one another’s accuracy and skill quite well. Thus, if one member of the group was better than the other, both would pretty clearly notice. And a rational decision, you might think, would be for the less accurate group member to begin to favor the views of the more accurate one — and for the accurate one to favor his or her own assessments.

But that’s not what happened. Instead, report the study authors, “the worse members of each dyad underweighted their partner’s opinion (i.e., assigned less weight to their partner’s opinion than recommended by the optimal model), whereas the better members of each dyad overweighted their partner’s opinion.” Or to put it more bluntly, individuals tended to act “as if they were as good or as bad as their partner” — even when they quite obviously weren’t.

The researchers tried several variations on the experiment, and this “equality bias” didn’t go away. In one case, a “running score” reminded both members of the pair who was faring better (and who worse) at identifying the target — just in case it wasn’t obvious enough already. In another case, the task became much more difficult for one group member than the other, leading to a bigger gap in scores — accentuating differences in performance. And finally, in a third variant, actual money was offered for getting it right.

None of this did away with the “equality bias.”

The research psychologists attribute this to our need to belong to groups and get along with people. It seems that need outweighs any practical consideration, a good deal of the time, including when money is on the line. Fascinating, right? People who are right and know they’re right defer to people they know are wrong in order to get along and maintain group dynamics, even when it costs them to do so.

When it comes to climate change, this is a serious problem.

Aside: Climate change is a real thing that is really happening and is a complete and total catastrophe. There is no debate on this point in any credible scientific circle. If you think that there is, I’m so sorry, but you’ve been had.

/aside

We end up not moving forward with policy solutions because we keep acting like the actual experts and the paid non-expert hacks share some kind of equivalence when they patently don’t.

But–and I’m sure I’m not the only person thinking this–it’s present in every community, including the SBC.

Ah! See? I told you I’d come around to it.

People act as if the opinions and contributions of experts and amateurs are equivalent when they are not.

Thankfully, the fates of human civilization and a minimum of 30% of animal and plant species do not rest on this fact. The worst that happens in most cases is that a person walks around for a good long time in a garment that looks like utter shit and feels really fabulous about it. On a scale of worldwide catastrophe, it doesn’t even rank.

On the other hand, as this science makes pretty clear, an entire generation of sewers are being educated largely by internet celebrities who are too incompetent even to understand how incompetent they are. It’s not a catastrophe, no, but it is a crying shame. And as predicted by the social psychologists, if anyone ever speaks up to point out that some of them are experts and other are, well … not …, they are pilloried as Mean Girls, jelluz haterz, and bullies.

Aside 2: Yep, I count myself in the group of people sometimes wandering happily about in a garment that on later reflection was not up to snuff. It happens. We’re all human. I won’t melt if someone points it out, though tact is always preferred. It doesn’t count as “bravery” to “put yourself out there” if you feel entitled to nothing but praise; and if you’re going to present your work in public you need to be prepared for public criticism.

/aside

So it’s not the end of the world, no, but it’s a detriment to all of us. The people getting the money, in many cases, haven’t earned it; the people with valuable skills to share don’t have the platform to do so; we keep acting as if everyone’s equal when they’re not to be Nice and keep everyone happy, even though not everyone is happy; there are entire boiling lava rivers of resentment and bitterness flowing right under all the green meadows we’re so happily skipping over (in our badly-pressed culottes and boxy tops with peter pan collars, no less). It’s weird. Can’t we, as an online culture, agree that it’s not a violation of the Geneva Convention if someone points out that a hem is crooked or a print isn’t matched? Does it matter if it’s not “nice”? Don’t we all benefit from increased honesty and openness? Do any of us actually expect to be perfect, or need to be treated as if we are perfect in order to function day to day? If you really don’t want people to point out how you fucked up, is it so much to ask that you acknowledge it yourself, then? Hey look at this horrible side seam–I really fucked up!

That went off on a bit of a tangent. Pardon me. Let’s drag it back on track:

The Equality Bias! It makes everything worse while we smile and pretend nothing’s wrong. Fight it!

Naomi’s political lens is so focused that it’s blinding. This is less a book about climate change than it is about why climate change is now the perfect excuse to do everything she’s always wanted to do anyway (eg. scrap globalization, redistribute wealth), which is fine, but she ignores any contrary evidence. For example, she has a brief section on the brief flourishing and untimely death of Ontario’s green energy economy, which she blames 100% on the WTO’s decision on domestic content. The waffling and delays of government regulators on applications, the constant changes in direction, and the dead-set-contrarian politics of the mostly rural ridings where wind energy projects were to be sited were completely overlooked, but as anyone who actually went through the process can tell you, the domestic content reg change was the least of any developer’s worries, and came after years and years of frustrations brought about by the public sector.

She spends a great deal of time criticizing anyone else whose political perspectives change how they perceive climate science and solutions, but is much, much worse herself in this book. No information penetrates unless it conforms with her pre-existing beliefs. But the global carbon cycle is not sentient. It doesn’t care how carbon emissions are reduced; it doesn’t even care if they are reduced at all. It does not vote and has no political preferences. WE do; and so it’s up to us to make some decisions about if and how we’re going to turn things around. It should be a mark of deep shame to any thinking citizen in a democratic society that authoritarian China is pulling so far ahead in the transition to a renewable economy.

The flaws with This Changes Everything can be boiled down to two, major, fundamental issues:

1. She acts as if the private and public spheres were diametric and opposed, rather than almost entirely overlapping. A person who works all day in a corporation then goes home and becomes a voter and consumer. People move back and forth between the private and public sector in terms of employment all the time. We are not talking about two different species–the private, evil homo sapiens determined to ruin the earth at a profit and the loving, public homo sapiens trying desperately to save it. It’s all just people.

2. The public sphere is as complicit in this as the private sphere. The reason we do not have a healthy, thriving renewable energy sector in Ontario right now is because the people of Ontario didn’t want it. They had it, and then put the politicians of the province under so much pressure to gut it that eventually they did to save their mandate. The moratorium on offshore wind projects in Ontario is a perfect example: two (small) corporations were all set to do the assessment work necessary to figure out if their Lake Ontario projects would work or not, but the government made offshore projects in Ontario illegal because the voters in Scarborough demanded it.

This is a terrible book on climate change. You’d be better off reading almost anything else on the subject.